> Imagine a high school boys' locker room come to life
speaking of toxic, why the stereotyping? It's not all locker-stuffing and hazing everywhere across the world; I had a blast in high school athletics with friends, and we didn't go out of our way to ruin anyone's day.
When I imagine that I am taken back by memories of camaraderie, pride, friendship, and group motivation towards a goal -- I'm quite sure that wasn't the imagery you wanted to project.
We partook in community service, worked at homeless shelters, the whole gambit. I've probably never been so virtuous as those days.
Not every locker room is filled with hateful machismo, and not every jock is a cruel bully -- don't paint with such wide strokes and expect to keep the details.
now, that said , i'm sorry that you received such treatment, and I hope that you find a friendlier place to direct time and effort; thankfully the DE/WM community is vast enough to find a place that is worth being.
> > Imagine a high school boys' locker room come to life
>
> speaking of toxic, why the stereotyping?
For a lot of us, "a high school boy's locker room" is just a cliché from US films. We had no equivalent to this in my country; we were expected to shower and get dressed at home and had nothing even remotely similar at school.
It is a cliché. One presented by the US to the world so many times that it has come clear way to express a stereotype.
I sure hope that real-life locker rooms are unlike what you portray in arts and films, but as a foreigner, it's the references we've got.
I don't know about that. I might get a bit of hate for that, but I'll say it. This pauli person didn't contribute a single thing to the project, afaics. Pushing CoC on projects your not involved in is activism. So don't cry if the projects rejects the proposal. How often did we see, that a CoC was pushed by people like this, pushing out maintainers and creating an echo chamber that slowly dies. I'm certainly very happy that my open source stuff is boring enough to not be targeted by this. Politics makes open source very unattractive to me.
I have a lot of respect for Drew for the technical work he did, but it's difficult to take this seriously. Maybe because we come from very different cultures, I don't know. I've never felt the need for any "community" for my window manager of choice (which happens to be sway) and can't imagine what a "victim of harrasment" for such a thing would look like. If whatever the developer clique are doing (which are actually pushing the thing forward) works for them — great! I'd be just fine with it as a user.
> can't imagine what a "victim of harrasment" for such a thing would look like
Well, Drew's article gives a concrete example of a victim. But beyond this specific article, it is not difficult to find examples of people who were harassed when trying to be involved in an open source community. This is pretty much the reason why so many open source projects are adopting codes of conduct.
A community is just another name for somewhere you go to for troubleshooting, be it a forum, Stack Exchange or Discord? Unless you have never needed that, and that RTFM has been enough.
Sure, if you call that community. Bug reports or questions generally do not require mentioning your race, ethnicity, nationality or identity preferences. I've never done it and as a result never had problems with anyone¹. If someone actively drags politics of any kind into a purely technical discussion, and then looks surprised when some bigoted idiot blows his nut — well, that looks like a a completely made-up problem from my neck of the woods.
1: let me mention here that I come from an ethnic minority in my country and for reasons completely unrelated to this discussion am not welcome in many corners of the internet.
> Bug reports or questions generally do not require mentioning your race, ethnicity, nationality or identity preferences
Sure, but pronouns? If someone refers to you using the wrong pronoun (e.g., assuming you're male, which this Vaxry person apparently admits to doing), don't you want to point it out somehow?
> Bug reports or questions generally do not require mentioning your race, ethnicity, nationality or identity preferences.
There are people whose reply to that statement would be "Help! I'm being oppressed!" . The sort of people who say being race-neutral is white supremacy.
There's a lot of bored people who just want to feel like social activists because they've been taught it's noble (no matter how cringe it is to normal people). And there's no lower-effort way of doing this than causing drama in tech communities where no one cares about your race or gender. It's a perfect place to turn into a battleground, and then if they reject you, you run to social media to virtue signal about toxicity.
But to ask a question about bitmap rendering do you really need to enter you real name and pronouns of choice? Wouldn’t ‘potato04’ be good enough? I’d go as far as to say that your RL identity is off topic.
You have no right to a response from a community. Sure, it's a pity if you don't get support from a great project. But it's nothing you're guaranteed to receive. And that can even happen with projects that aren't considered toxic.
There is a Pacific Ocean between a “right” to a constructive response from a forum, and recognizing the much greater value of a forum that gives constructive responses.
And? They are not obliged to adhere to your definition of a constructive response or the form of community you or anybody wants as long as they stay within the boundaries of law. It's a pity, as I said, but if that's what the existing community wants to do, let them. Who are you to say otherwise?
But why should one not feel free on comment upon whatever they see, and comment however negatively they want to? Because we should be tolerant of all?
I find it interesting that the "anti-Woke" also end up appealing to same values of tolerance that the "Woke" appeal to. Perhaps it points to the lack of diversity in Western thinking.
You may quickly feel the need for a "community" when you start to contribute, learn about its insides and want to push the project forward. Unless you're happy with publishing to your own fork that nobody knows about, software development is a social activity that often spawns social relationships.
> I've never felt the need for any "community" for my window manager of choice
I think hyperland is big within ricing community, where people try to setup their own computing environment. It's a fun creative outlet, I used to do it a lot in high school. It taught me so much about linux which later on helped me professionally, so it's sad to see that the community isn't more inclusive.
I think Discord servers for a software project tend to attract a younger audience and are more noisy/active and have offtopic discussion, compared to something like a user/-dev channel on IRC.
The Wayland community in general do feel like that it's comprised of a lot of young, immature and cliquey members, which is quite unfortunate since it's an interesting technology.
These attitudes can be seen not only in political topics (such as the one described in the article), but also other stuff in general.
For example, sway once forced users who are using Nvidia gpus to type --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia so that the compositor works properly. It's nothing explicitly offensive, but you can see how their attitudes against "unapproved" outgroups oozes out here.
I used to feel frustrated about the flag, having bought an Nvidia GPU for ML, not knowing how badly DRM works on it.
I don’t blame the maintainers of a compositor of struggling with Nvidia holding back a proper API? My Intel built in GPU works fine with sway.
I can see how that can be perceived as abrasive, I think Drew tends to polarize opinions from time to time. But this isn’t about purposefully misgendering a person and various other acts of harassment.
Bro since Lisa Su in charge things changed a bit, my 7900xt works like a charm with X and wayland and same did rx580 for few years now, amdgpu is open source driver integrated in kernel of most Linux distributions, its plug an play, just install gpu, turn on the machine, boot into your linux then load amdgpu module reboot, and you can already immediately set ur display on 144hz, try that with my 1080gtx and you are locked at 60 with noveau driver module loaded, until u install their proprietary sheit....
There are many examples of companies and countries that have improved their competitiveness and efficiency by adopting open source strategies. The creation of skills through all levels is of fundamental importance to both companies and countries.
That's.. quite disappointing..
Still, I do have some hope that just maybe, maybe he will understand how the toxicity harms... others, and make changes for the better..
If you think people asking to go by a set of pronouns is a bridge too far, you're part of this toxic community. Do you go through life calling every single person you met "he/him"? Trans people (and anyone not going by male pronouns) don't like being misgendered, and refusing to not do that, especially when informed via their discord username, is being toxic. If you want to say the Internet belongs to just people with men pronouns, say that, don't strawman behind the "no one cares" nonsense.
Backlash should come in the form of a warning, followed by a block from the community, not in the form of a targeted harassment campaign. I think we can both agree on that, right?
Who said that all communities should be “non toxic” and inclusive? It is definitely idiotic to lose possibly valuable members because of pronouns, but it’s their own community.
I was going to just neglect this thinking that Drew may be subjecting this community to his strict standards. But then, there is this:
> And so, one of the moderators changed the pronouns in their nickname to “who/cares”
This is very a specific and active involvement of a moderator in the act. Such interventions are a gross misuse of moderator privileges in any community.
> Let’s be real, this isn’t like, calling someone the N-word or something.
That's a low effort attempt at downplaying and justifying an act in bad faith. If you go back long enough, you would find similar roots for the N-word (quoting wikipedia: "It was initially seen as a relatively neutral term"). It became so obnoxious because of the involvement of hateful people with the word. The same will eventually happen here.
> Who said that all communities should be “non toxic” and inclusive?
To this, the following quote is relevant:
> Later he describes a more moderated community (the /r/unixporn discord server) as having an environment in which everyone is going to “lick your butthole just to be nice”.
They aren't just tolerating bad behavior in their own community. They take a vocal stance of hatred towards other communities that don't.
> but it’s their own community.
So are the proud boys and neonazis. They all start like this by tolerating hate and brushing aside criticism in the name of joke. I don't know where you'd draw a line.
For now though, I think Drew is justified in calling this out. I do use software from people whose political views I cannot agree with. But they all keep their politics and their communities separate. This is not like that. This is one community I want to stay away from. Using their software keeps the possibility of that encounter open. This blog is useful for people like me.
> This is very a specific and active involvement of a moderator in the act. Such interventions are a gross misuse of moderator privileges in any community.
Oh, they can't express themselves?
They can't express their sentiment of gender abolition because mental illness makes some people care a fuckton about gender?
Misusing moderator privileges to modify someone else's profile to mock their gender identity isn't exactly what normal people call 'expressing themselves'.
> because mental illness makes some people care a fuckton about gender?
It's genuinely amusing to see a bunch of people in this era hold neolithic-age ideas about what mental illness is. If you haven't noticed, the concept of mental health and gender identity has changed a lot in the past century.
You're free to have a toxic, noninclusive community. Setup a login window in your discord server that clearly states "This is a toxic, transphobic, homophobic, racist, etc community. By clicking the Agree button you forfeit all rights to being treated with any form of respect and acknowledge you may be attacked, harassed, doxxed and threatened for any reason at any time. If you complain in any way shape or form, you will be immediately blocked without warning."
You can use mee6 to set that up and enjoy your toxic and non-inclusive community.
The absence of any such login window implies that a basic social contract is followed, which this community is clearly in violation of.
It seems Internet Communities of all kind default to a kind of hateful toxicity unless steps are taken in the opposite direction. If the Mods chose to encourage such behavior you get 4chan style levels of degeneracy pretty fast.
It's pretty easy to prevent that though: ban the N word and the K word, the derogatory word for Jews. That gets you 90% of the way there. You'll put off the types that drop into communities just to shit the place up. The rest of it is just letting people be themselves and the emergent culture that comes along with it. Just ban 2 words, you don't need an endless CoC to prevent the toxicity, those are generally for enforcing much more strict ideological conformity.
> I did some cool stuff, but I deeply regret the way I treated people. It wasn’t really my fault – I was a product of my environment – but it was my responsibility. Today, I’m proud to have built many welcoming communities, where people are rewarded for their involvement, rather than coming away from their experience hurt.
> My advice to the leadership begins with taking a serious look in the mirror.
What does this guy talks about? He bans people on Mastodon after 2 messages. He clearly values his ego more than anyone else.
Well, hyprland has toxic community. The problem is that there is no way to turn off xwayland scaling in Sway, so I don't care about community or whatever if they can deliver working software and sway is broken by design.
Why did Drew all of a sudden start doing this advocacy stuff? Not that I disagree with it, I'm just curious... it feels performative. Like is he trying to prove some kind of point to someone? It's definitely an entertaining read, but I wonder why he pivoted to such a strong degree
Seems like everything can be perceived as hate/toxic especially when there is an asymmetric relationship between the sacred/protected vs everyone else. It's like dealing with police, anything you say can and will be used against you. I will limit all comms with people who wield that much power over me. It like talking to a landmine.
Look, the solution to FLOSS community issues is not to whine about them on your blog, that's just as toxic as what these folks are doing. It's rather to fork the project under a new name, so that potential contributors who dislike the toxicity (whether or not they're "in the right" about their particular dislikes) have a venue that they can resort to. Everything else is just a big distraction.
The thing about toxicity is that it's harmful to those who are most aware of it, such as marginalized folks. So 'raising awareness' is exactly what should not be done in this case! (Of course Drew is not fully cognizant of this, because of the entrenched privilege that's so common in the FLOSS space.) You should instead lower awareness, by offering something better as an alternative.
There have been project that has been forked for these reasons. They never go anywhere because the people forking are not involved in the original community as dev.
That wouldn't let people make it about them instead of the project. Fundamentally that's what this stuff is, "my issue is most important" and trying to use popular language and concerns about things being "toxic" to pay attention to them. If they just did a fork, they'd actually have to develop software (or more likely split into groups that disagreed about some other political thing and fight about that)
But in all seriousness, Drew should spend time creating and living in communities with standards he likes, and stay out of those he doesn't. Nobody is being doxxed here, nobody is being harassed outside the community, from what I can tell nothing serious has occurred here except that the discourse in this community is not to Drew's liking
An open source project like wlroots is a massive labor of love, and it becomes part of ones identity. You're in essence asking Drew to abandon it. In other words, you're asking him to rip out part of his soul.
The nature of FOSS is that you don't get to decide what people do with what you build after you give it to them. Nobody's asking him to abandon it, only to acknowledge that people are going to use it, even people he doesn't like, for projects, even projects he doesn't like. If not being able to tell people how to act while using your software is a deal breaker, FOSS isn't for you, you probably want a ToS instead.
How is Drew supposed to make wlroots better without participating in the community of wlroots' users? And improvements come from looking at all uses and generalizing across them rather than looking at a subset. If he ignores HyperLand and makes a change that impairs Hyprlands' usage of wlroots, the HyprLand community will very loudly show up in the wlroots issue trackers, etc.
Many people in Discord communities learned English as a second language, and some of them are self-taught.
Some languages are weird and do not use genders at all. People coming from those languages have a hard time dealing with gendered languages such as English.
Some people do not know what misgendering is, or even what a trans person is, or their culture might not deal with that in the same way your cultures does. Probably they have a different term for it or it is taboo for them to talk about it.
Deaf people are about the same percentage of the population as people who identify as trans. Have you learned sign language? when you approach people, do you consider they may not be able to hear you? Why is this?
There are many groups that also amount to 0.6 to 5% of the population yet are more understanding that the rest of the population may not be prepared to address their needs. Not because of malice or hate but because they simply do not know or they come from a different culture.
Correction: this was not a case of accidental misgendering. The post refers to someone abusing mod privileges to edit someone's pronouns to "who/cares".
I am just trying to say that we should begin our conversations giving each other the benefit of the doubt, and then build mutual understanding through compassion and empathy. That is all.
That mod is likely an ill-intentioned guy and in violation of the Discord ToS, but starting every conversation by accusing others of being ill-intentioned is how we end achieving nothing as a society.
Punishment and an escalation of intolerance are not the goal, tolerance is. We are not going to heal the world one accusation or insult at a time.
When you are not a prejudiced person, a good starting point is to consider yourself fortunate in that respect, and then acknowledging others might not have been as fortunate as you.
Is there no self reflection in these communities? Everywhere they go is toxic and hateful. We're giving so much rope to protected groups that they will eventually hang everyone with it.
I rarely find a CoC to be "woke", and it would be helpful if you can provide cover concrete examples. What I see in big products is mostly "Don't attack others, don't tell dirty jokes, no harassment of any kind" which I find neutral and fair.
I had a look expecting to find a few quickly, but couldn't. The ones I saw do mention you can't be mean about, say, gender, but among a vast swathe of other features. So I can't see how that's particularly woke.
I suppose there was the brouhaha at Stack Exchange about their code or conduct and how you must use user-provided pronouns if they are specified (not even using terms like OP or "they") but looking at CoC now I can't see any mention of this. Not is SE an open-source project, it is a for-profit closed-source project with volunteer contributions.
https://www.contributor-covenant.org/ is (was?) the most widely adopted code of conduct in FOSS, initially drafted by a Ruby contributor, who also happens to be transgender if that's pertinent information to you. It's the genesis seed from which all this code of conduct madness stems from. Personally I'd stick with "be excellent to each other" or "say what you want, just don't use slurs or deliberately insult other contributors" or something vague, ambiguous and universally understood as that. I'm not really a fan of rigorous social rules, so my view on this starts from that position.
Unfortunately it seems that "be excellent to each other" is not specific enough to be understood by everyone.
E.g., "address people using the name and gender that they use to refer to themselves". You would expect this to be obvious, and yet... Or maybe making this explicit is promoting a "woke ideology"?
I don't know how such a simple thing can be "annoying". Do you tell dirty jokes with colleagues when you have lunch in the cafeteria? If not, how is it difficult (not) to do the same thing online? That seems a very low bar.
I am a male and I am not some sort of saint that never watches porn or never has dirty thoughts in my private life, but this (dirty jokes) isn't something I would complain about.
btw I noticed that many women really don't like dirty jokes, like, disgusted by them. This can be a real turnoff for inclusivity -- imagine a woman interested in contributing to the project but decides not to participate because of issues like this.
These aren’t social clubs, they’re organizations of humans dedicated to building software. Telling jokes in e.g. an issue task or a project mailing list wastes everyone’s time. And why would you be having to filter in the first place?
FOSS software projects are social clubs. They're endeavors undertaken willfully, voluntarily, usually without any expectation of financial compensation, out of personal interest. They have a goal, yes, but at the end of the day people get involved because it's fun, and they're trying to have fun and do something they think is cool. Telling someone they can't share a winkyface in chat is offputting to I'd say most talented people that do this sort of thing out of personal interest. I don't think it's a coincidence that we see alongside this rise on CoCs a rise of frustratingly hostile user experience in software.
For example "No right or alt-right bullshit, Nazi content, conspiracy narratives.". What about leftish bullshit? That also exists, so why be so specific? The answer to me is pretty clear. These are rules for a specific political worldview.
There you go, agitating. That's not what they're saying. They're saying that the rules are one sided, you're allowed to be an ideological extremist as long as you're the right kind of ideological extremist.
I'd personally like to contribute in communities again, like it used to be, where insane political ideology of any stripe was not an important aspect of contribution. It seems these days people like me, who don't want to either see the N word every five minutes or hear about late stage capitalism and gender identity, don't have a place in the FOSS world.
But it's a private org, they can limit speech how they see fit. Communities need to have rules; if not communities can become pretty toxic, and drive people away who might want to contribute, or even just seek help.
By making it clear they ban nazi's and the alt-right, people know what they're getting into when they join. I don't see the issue, and I don't buy into "horseshoe theory" or the idea that far left and far right are just two sides of the same coin, because they're not.
You're hearing lots about late stage capitalism because of the times we're in.
You're hearing lots about gender identity because until recently in modern capitalist society it was dangerous for people who didn't fit traditional gender norms to express that openly.
Well so is the Hyprland community, yet we seem to be discussing the merits of deciding for them how they limit speech. We don't want them to do it how they see fit as you put it, because their criteria are not to our liking.
I personally find the politicization of everything off putting and won't contribute to projects that do it. I'd call the constant push to shoehorn gender identity into every crevice of our lives toxic and I'd say it drives me and other people away. But that's OK right, because they don't want people like me contributing, that's the point, and maybe I have a right to not want people like them contributing in my projects also, maybe I don't want to be inclusive towards people that aren't inclusive towards me.
>I personally find the politicization of everything off putting and won't contribute to projects that do it. I'd call the constant push to shoehorn gender identity into every crevice of our lives toxic and I'd say it drives me and other people away.
Is gender identity being "shoehorned" into every crevice of our lives, or are people just more comfortable expressing who they really are? And now that they are, people who didn't need to feel bad about expressing their identity don't always know how to handle it.
You're mentioning a service ran by a very particular community that draws Antifa logos on badges given to participants of its events. Of course it's not going to tolerate right-wing bullshit and it has every right to state that, but I fail to see how that's on-topic here. It's hardly a surprise that a CoC used by a community that's likely "woke" by your standards appears as "woke" to you.
You asserted that CoCs "usually broadcast a woke world view", and when asked for an example provided one that's used by a clearly left-aligned community. You could very well make a completely opposite statement and also find a supporting example and it would be just as informative.
Many communities aren't explicitly politically aligned and their CoCs aren't either.
There are plenty of CoCs which explicitly advocate for ideas from Critical Race Theory such as “anti-meritocracy” (meritocracy discriminates against the historically disadvantaged) and “anti-racism” (you have to be discriminatory to fight discrimination). I’m on mobile so my Google-fu is a little weak. All I can leave you with is the (unsatisfactory) anecdote that people have expoused these ideas to me in real life, saying things like “If you don’t have enough PoC contributing to your FLOSS project, you need to go and invite some regardless of if they are good contributors or not”
The only time I've ever seen CoC invoked is as a kind of weapon to settle petty disagreements. Something someone disagrees with becomes "making me feel unsafe" or such nonsense. They're one of those ideas that seems harmless but in practice is only something agitators use to make the project about them (usually some woke ideology thing) instead of the project. I would never get involved in project that had a CoC.
You have over 20k(!) karma on HN and you've never seen the CoC(community guidelines) invoked in a way here that wasn't as a weapon to settle petty disagreements?
Codes of Conduct are absolutely, 100% a way to enforce a specific world view. Anyone who disagrees should look up the first SQLite CoC and how the HN community reacted to it.
The idea of a code of conduct should be fairly neutral but it never is. I tend to avoid communities with posted CoCs.
In reality 90% of people do not care one way or the other, they just want their problems fixed.
In theory you are right and I would agree, but unfortunately we live in a world where it's not immediately obvious to everyone that women, people whose skin is black, homosexuals, trans, etc are normal people who deserve same respect that anyone else, and for those people (for which it's not obvious), it can be useful to be explicit what "other people" means.
The problem with this is that it relies on an unspoken standard of "annoy". If you misgender someone, does that count as annoying them, or as them being easily annoyed?
The issue with people is that we all have very different ideas of what kind and respectful behavior is? Especially relevant when so many different folks from so many places come together online.
Setting the minimum standards helps set expectations for all participants. I don’t see an issue with spelling things out in more concrete terms.
Maybe the problem is your radar. I understand that extreme ends of the social spectrum are frustrating for people supposedly not caught up in whatever the thing is, especially if it’s off topic, but if “anything” sets it off, you might consider recalibrating.
People taking offense to every damned thing, not accepting apologies or remediation, hijacking conversations about an off topic politicized issue, or other similar disruptive behavior is one thing, but people standing up for themselves or asking for a little common courtesy and respect like anyone else sounds reasonable to me. If someone, not necessarily you, were to lump both of those people together and dismiss, participate in bad behavior, or fail to hold others accountable for it, then they would be the problem, and are generally why exhaustive and/or “woke” reactions are born.
>I think a Code of Conduct stating "Be kind and show respect to each other" would be sufficient.
You're missing the (IMO) point of a CoC: to pre-empt unnecessary discussions on what e.g. "show respect" means.
Basically, if you write explicit rules up-front like "don't call schlems a bunch of wafters", and someone says "hey, you bunch of wafters" in \#schlem then we don't have to re-hash a dumbass philosophy discussion yet again about whether moderators really have a right to censor free speech about $TOPIC.
In other words, a CoC is like a FaQ you tell assholes to go read when they claim what they're doing is fine and accepted. This is good because it helps keep the topic to actually interesting technical discussion.
In General they do. But I disagree about your simpler is better point. I wouldn't want to have your average /pol/ User as part of my work if i can help it and it seems asking people to respect different gender and sexual identities is a great filter for toxic conservative edgelords.
But making a strong statement about the basics covers everything, and treats every bodies dignity at the same level.
Example:
1. Treat everyone with respect, regardless of differences
2. Treat everyone’s perspectives constructively, regardless of whether you agree with them
3. Consider honing your communication skills here. Fewer posts of increasing quality helps our community here, and increases your power in life everywhere.
Or something like that
It seems clear to me that would cover gender issues, but the point is don’t bully anyone is a stronger statement
—-
May be wrong but I have been thinking about this topic of specific vs general ethics communication a lot lately
Someone having trouble processing what gender identities mean can still learn to treat people with respect, without having to feel like they are being told what to think.
Picking up a habit of respectful treatment of people you don’t ever understand or agree with, explicitly independent of any specifics, is important in itself.
You are probably correct in principle but I guess it's more of a practical thing. People that are bothered by respecting other peoples gender identity aren't going to be swayed by these principled arguments. It's simply more practical to just filter them with a few specific keywords and not have to deal with them, those that stay aren't likely to become a problem.
Simpler is better, though. People's ideas of themselves shouldn't be the new "I'm vegan, btw" and forcing everyone to know and care about your idea of yourself is fucking bullshit, because nobody cares and the topic is something else.
It's extremely narcistic to believe that everyone needs to care about how you think of yourself. I don't respect your gender and sexual identity simply because I don't care, it's none of my business.
> I don't respect your gender and sexual identity simply because I don't care, it's none of my business.
And that's why it should filter you. I can respect someones idea of themselves and their gender or sexual identity precisely because I don't care. Working with People as opposed to working with machines requires accepting their individuality in a lot of facets. I personally am disgusted by religion and religious ideology, yet I can work with people even if they are believers, because I respect them as human beings.
Reminds me of the old I’m color blind, I don’t see race trope. Recognizing where someone is coming from, even if you don’t personally like it, that’s a basic requirement for communication.
Those instance where people complain about misgendering? That’s not when someone accidentally uses the wrong pronoun. It’s when a person purposefully ignores someone else’s wishes and calls them in a way that is hurtful.
To me saying it’s just messages in a bug tracker, and identity doesn’t matter, that person can’t be serious. I feel we have to learn this lesson over and over again.
This is the one of the biggest things. If someone identifies with a set of pronouns (and it's one of the mainstream set no less) and the community goes out of their way to misgender them, there's no excuse for it, other than they're being purposely toxic. This is also something that takes zero effort to do (just call everyone "they" unless they explicitly indicate otherwise), and metiocracy or otherwise has no bearings.
“John may desire to be called John, but he can’t realistically expect people won’t call him Bob just because he says it’s not his name.”
Sorry, this is nonsense. That you think John should be called Bob has nothing to do with your view on personal identity - it’s just you being an asshole because you think your politics are the most important thing in the world.
"John may desire to be referred to as if he's 6'6" in height, despite being only 5'1", but he can't realistically expect everyone else to comply with this if he requests it."
For the understanding of most people, being a woman or a man isn't an identity, but is a fact of material biological reality. The belief system around 'gender identity' has fairly niche acceptance on a global scale, even in countries where it is being heavily evangelized.
I’m just unclear why you care. John wants to be called John. He also would prefer you refer to him as a “him”. Neither takes any effort whatsoever, and both are entirely polite. Neither requires anything from you that you wouldn’t otherwise be doing.
Refusal literally reads as an obstinate and intentional desire to be an asshole solely for the sake of being an asshole.
Sorry, I don't understand this discussion about gender. If someone on the internet desires to be referred to as "he" and "him", or "she" and "her", then you do it, no? How is gender identity relevant?
This is what I love about the internet: to anything you can write you can get the most enlightened or insane response. I hope that years later, your response will end up on the right side of these two. (Provided this lands on some kind of internet archive)
"In one particular incident, the moderators of the Discord server engaged in a harassment campaign against a transgender user, including using their moderator privileges to edit the pronouns in their username from “they/she” to “who/cares”."
If their political values lead them to actions like this, their political values are garbage and the author is right to speak out.
We don't actually know what happened. Too many people tend to declare themselves as the victims with no regard of explaining how they actually behaved towards the others.
Cause and Effect. In many cases the people who caused the effect conveniently leave out the parts that created the effects.
The article is itself a second hand account. However, it quotes very specific incidents, especially this:
> And so, one of the moderators changed the pronouns in their nickname to “who/cares”. […] Let’s be real, this isn’t like, calling someone the N-word or something.
I don't care what the political affiliation of the moderator is, but this is pretty low for any community.
Not really? If you have a problem person within a community, it’s fairly common to make fun of them. You wouldn’t say it was “low” if a similar thing happened to someone you disagreed with politically.
Misusing moderator privilege to 'make fun of them' is not 'fairly common' or even considered acceptable. Please stop downplaying unacceptable and toxic behavior.
> You wouldn’t say it was “low” if a similar thing happened to someone you disagreed with politically.
It is low for a moderator to misuse their privilege, irrespective of their political stance. It's a good standard to judge people by - whether they are right, left or center.
You haven’t spent much time on IRC/forums, have you? Gatekeeping undesirables was and still is a common practice in those circles, one that keeps the community safe from external activists that wish to corrupt it. This is not “abusing mod powers”, this is cleaning bad actors from the community. Even HackerNews has methods in place to mitigate bad actors, although they’re far more hidden and frankly more dangerous than simply being told one is unwelcome.
Condescension, hubris, hatred - it's clear what you're arguing for. No - what you said isn't normal. But I'm sure you're aren't going to stop arguing for the right to bigotry and hatred.
I've seen CoC touted as a singular good destroy at least two communities by now, so you may not realize that your "social reformist" getup is your own personal obsession with your own personal politics, but it's plain to see for the rest of us
One thing that's lacking from Drew's main point is not asserting why "cracking edgy jokes" or making edgy political statements is useless to an open source community.
Or rather there's no other point other than "please stop being mean", while good, it doesn't merit more than a virtue, in contrast to 4chan style people, they will make make terrible arguments/justifications for being edgy.
The only way to succeed in stamping out toxicity is to have as many strong points about why it shouldn't be tolerated.
I'm being very hyperbolic, he's a perfectly decent guy, but he is very opinionated and can be pretty harsh with people he disagrees with or that do things he doesn't like. Some would call him toxic, I wouldn't, but I think this word "toxic" is thrown around too much. I've been called toxic for farting. I'm gonna come out and say it: it's just boys being boys. You can chastise me for that position, but people are going to be themselves in the world, we don't need to correct every indecent viewpoint or act of expression that happens anywhere anytime, and we can't. Hyprland is good software, and this comes from a Sway user who has no interest in using Hyprland at all. If some guys in a chatroom want to make dongle jokes or whatever I think you've got to be looking for reasons to be mad to make a big deal out of it.
speaking of toxic, why the stereotyping? It's not all locker-stuffing and hazing everywhere across the world; I had a blast in high school athletics with friends, and we didn't go out of our way to ruin anyone's day.
When I imagine that I am taken back by memories of camaraderie, pride, friendship, and group motivation towards a goal -- I'm quite sure that wasn't the imagery you wanted to project.
We partook in community service, worked at homeless shelters, the whole gambit. I've probably never been so virtuous as those days.
Not every locker room is filled with hateful machismo, and not every jock is a cruel bully -- don't paint with such wide strokes and expect to keep the details.
now, that said , i'm sorry that you received such treatment, and I hope that you find a friendlier place to direct time and effort; thankfully the DE/WM community is vast enough to find a place that is worth being.